Month: April 2013

ARTICLE: A New Assessment of Palenque’s Palace Tablet

David StuartLeave a comment
The name glyph of Ux Yop Huun
The name glyph of Ux Yop Huun

The new publication Maya Archaeology 2 includes my article “The Name of Paper: The Mythology of Crowning and Royal Nomenclature on Palenque’s Palace Tablet.” This piece was written back in 2009 and offers a somewhat novel take on the mythical-historical narrative on one of Palenque’s more important texts, focusing on the role of its unusual mythological protagonist, Ux Yop Huun (name glyph is shown at right). Much about this topic remains fairly opaque, and there is still a great deal to discuss and consider about the Palace Tablet and its layered meanings.

Maya Archaeology 2 is available for order here.

A pdf of my article on the Palace Tablet can be accessed here: The Name of Paper: The Mythology of Crowning and Royal Nomenclature on Palenque’s Palace Tablet

EDITOR’S NOTE: Starting now all entries on Maya Decipherment will be classified as one of five categories: Articles, Notes, Archives, News, and Books. More categories may be introduced in the future, but I see this as a good way to start organizing the varied sorts of contributions that have made their way onto the blog thus far.

NEWS: Very Early Maya Ceremonial Architecture at Ceibal

David Stuart6 Comments

Standing_on_Ceremony
The most recent issue of Science includes an article on the remarkable finds recently made at Ceibal (Seibal), Guatemala. Excavations there have revealed very early evidence of Maya ceremonial buildings and civic space, dating as far back as 1000 BCE. It’s wonderful and significant work, extending the roots of Maya religious architecture back to the Early Preclassic. Congratulations go out to Takeshi Inomata (my old Vanderbilt classmate and road-trip companion), Daniela Triadan and their colleagues.

Science News article

Link to Science article (subscription required for full access)

“Early Maya Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization”

Takeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, Kazuo Aoyama, Victor Castillo, and Hitoshi Yonenobu

Science, Vol. 340, no. 6131, pp. 467-471

ABSTRACT:
The spread of plaza-pyramid complexes across southern Mesoamerica during the early Middle Preclassic period (1000 to 700 BCE) provides critical information regarding the origins of lowland Maya civilization and the role of the Gulf Coast Olmec. Recent excavations at the Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, documented the growth of a formal ceremonial space into a plaza-pyramid complex that predated comparable buildings at other lowland Maya sites and major occupations at the Olmec center of La Venta. The development of lowland Maya civilization did not result from one-directional influence from La Venta, but from interregional interactions, involving groups in the southwestern Maya lowlands, Chiapas, the Pacific Coast, and the southern Gulf Coast.

Radio-carbon and the Long Count

David Stuart4 Comments

Tikaljaguar
New carbon-14 tests of one of the famous carved wooden lintels from Tikal generally confirm the long-established GMT correlations of the Maya Long Count calendar, as explained in a new press release from Penn State University. This is not the first test of the calendar correlation against radio carbon data — such efforts began some 50 years ago — but it does use the latest calibration methods.

The original study from Nature can be found here.

New Book: Maya Archaeology 2

David Stuart1 Comment

Maya Archaeology 2, edited by Charles Golden, Stephen Houston and Joel Skidmore. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco.

MA2-cover-349

Precolumbia Mesoweb Press has just published Maya Archaeology 2, a beautifully illustrated volume with important contributions on the archaeology and epigraphy of Calakmul and Palenque. Authors of the included reports and articles are Ramón Carrasco Vargas, María Cordeiro Baqueiro, Simon Martin, Arnoldo González Cruz, Guillermo Bernal Romero, and David Stuart. The book will be available May 2013, and order information is now available here through the Mesoweb website.